sign in sign up
<<
Home , Bury the Chains, Flagellation

Abolition in context: the historical background of the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade

Jeffrey HOPES Université du Mans

The abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament in 1807 was one of a series of legislative measures which led progressively to the abandonment of the slave economy in British held territories, culminating in the abolition of the legal framework of in 1833 and in 1838 when the apprenticeship system was ended.1 The whole process whereby first the slave trade and then slavery itself were abolished can only be understood if all the different contexts, economic, military, political, ideological, cultural and social in which it took place are taken into account. The constant inter-connection of these contexts precludes any simple reliance on single explanations for the abolition of the slave trade, however tempting such explanations may be. In briefly summarising the nature of this multiple contextualisation, I do not wish to enter the on-going and fraught debate on the reasons for the abolition of the slave trade but simply to present it as a multi-faceted question, one which, like so many historical events, takes on a different appearance according to the position – in time and space – from which we approach it.

Abolition and us

In this respect, the first context which needs to be mentioned is that of our own relationship to the issue of slavery. The bicentenary of abolition in 2007 has seen the publication of a flood of articles, books, exhibitions and radio and television programmes in Britain and abroad. Many of these are the work of white writers and historians. Viewed collectively they constitute a body of work in which commemoration of abolition and shame at the legacy of the slave trade are combined in a mixture of celebration and . Whilst at least some of the leaders of the abolitionist movement have been held up as models of moral and political probity, the slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool have been grappling with the painful legacy of a slave trade that constituted the very basis of their civic achievement. Much of this engagement involves reconsidering slavery in the context of twenty-first century British multiculturalism, provoking further, salutary friction between the ethos of tolerance and mutual comprehension (to which abolition can be claimed to have contributed) and the deep, persistent stigmata of slavery which remain embedded in British society.

1 The abolition of the slave trade was preceded notably by the 1799 act limiting the number of slaves who could be carried by British ships and by the 1806 Foreign . 12 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1

The sheer topicality of the slavery question, its refusal to be relegated to the status of a purely historical problem, makes any claim to objectivity, however well- grounded in historical method and practice, problematic. The particular situation and identity of the historians who write about the question can never be forgotten, making the study of the slave trade and slavery, like that of the Shoah, fraught with ideological interrogation. The selection of source material, the respective weight given to different sorts of information, the construction of the narrative of abolition, all are inevitably open to accusations of bias. Yet whilst in many ways how we view slavery and the slave trade depends on where we stand and where we come from, the battle for the high ground of objective truth is always worth pursuing. Amongst the greatest legacies of both the earliest slaves to record their experiences and the first abolitionists is the painstaking accumulation of evidence, embodied in The Interesting Narrative of or in the documents presented to Parliament by and his witnesses. The first wrested the privilege of secular autobiography from the rich and the famous, whilst the second paved the way for similar future investigations into such questions as the Poor Laws, public health and education.2

The

Contexts are not explanations and this rapid overview does not attempt to enter the debates surrounding various causes of the abolition of the slave trade. Such debates – in particular that initiated by Eric Williams in 19443 – are on-going despite periodic attempts to put them to rest. They often revolve around the degree of importance to be accorded to the various contexts that will be evoked here. First among these contexts is the trans-Atlantic slave trade itself, a trade which dates back to the fifteenth century and in which had participated since John Hawkins’s first slave voyage in 1562. Its first and most important characteristic is its international nature, involving as it did commerce between three continents carried on by a variety of European nations, in particular , Portugal, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and Denmark. To these were added the American colonies who progressively began importing their slaves directly instead of from European traders. To the trans-Atlantic voyages we must add the commerce carried on within the Caribbean and between the islands and the American continent. Slaves were transported to the European nations’ respective colonial territories, the principal ones being Cuba (Spain), (Portugal), Saint Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique (France) the southern, Dutch Antilles (Holland), and the various British colonies of which Jamaica and Barbados held the largest slave populations. But slave traders from one country did not limit themselves to the carriage of slaves to their corresponding colonies. For example, after Spain ceded the Asiento to Britain following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, British ships supplied the Spanish colonies, just as they sold to the French market in Saint Domingue at the end of the century. Indeed, carrying on the slave trade for other countries became a convenient way for British traders to avoid the restrictions placed on the number of slaves that could be

2 See Olaudah EQUIANO, The Interesting Narrative and other writings, Vincent CARRETTA (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003; Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791, London: James Phillips, 1791. This is Clarkson’s condensed version of the evidence he collected. 3 Eric WILLIAMS, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 13 loaded per ship in 1799, just as American traders regularly circumvented the largely ineffectual attempts of different states to restrict the importation of slaves. Following the abolition of the British slave trade, campaigners protested against the use of flags of convenience which saw British crews continuing to operate with impunity.

The slave trade was an increasingly deregulated trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. The South Sea Company, set up to manage Britain’s newly-won Asiento rights by purchasing slaves from the Royal African Company, was quickly faced with a parallel, ‘illegal’ trade involving not just other European traders but those from the newly developing slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool, the latter in particular specialising in unauthorised trade to the Spanish colonies. Even British attempts to impose heavy import duties on slaves disembarked in the American colonies proved increasingly difficult to administer. Whilst the slave trade was initially part of a mercantilist system to the extent that it constituted a profitable export trade in return for the goods (principally sugar) which came from Britain’s own colonies, it involved little in the way of bullion imports and encouraged a laissez-faire approach to tariffs. Even before Adam Smith attacked mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations the slave trade provided a potent example of deregulation. The so-called triangular trade, involving the export of British manufactured goods to Africa (of which arms from Britain and rum from America constituted an important part), the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the importation of sugar, tobacco and cocoa from the Caribbean was, at least in peace time, a mutually beneficial system of cheap European colonial imports made possible by the grotesquely imbalanced exchange in Africa of manufactured goods for a vast, cheap source of plantation labour.

The effects of deregulation on the profitability of the slave trade and of the sugar plantations is still a matter of hot debate. In a curious and somehow rather perverse inversion of ideological expectations, it is West Indian and black American historians who assert the diminishing profitability of the sugar industry, whereas white American and European historians have broadly argued for its continued, or even increasing profitability during the period of abolition. The effect of the first argument is to minimise the impact of the European abolitionist campaigns and to link the demise of the slave trade to the rise of more profitable uses of capital, notably industrial production and the East India trade. The second credits social, religious, and political developments within Europe for the disappearance of the slave trade. The debate on profitability is often highly technical and involves both the use of theoretical models and projections and reference to contemporary documents. For our purposes it is sufficient to remark that the profitability of the slave trade, which was only partially linked to that of the sugar industry, itself depended on a number of basic factors: the differential between the price paid for slaves in Africa and that paid in the colonies, both of which would of course be affected by the balance of supply and demand; the transport costs involved, including the fitting out and crewing of ships; the necessary measures for the ships’ security both on board (canons) and on the African coast (the construction of forts for defensive purposes, but also for assembling slaves prior to the voyage); insurance costs (particularly high in time of war); and the corresponding profitability of exports to Africa and colonial imports to Britain (though the latter were not in general carried by the ill-adapted slave ships which often returned across the Atlantic loaded with ballast). The profits of the trade were shared amongst the plantation owners (many of whom resided in England), the ship-owners (who were 14 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1 sometimes also planters), the merchants, and the captains. The slave trade was thus a complex business involving multiple variables. Despite the potentially enormous profits which it seemed to offer, it was subject to considerable risks. It is hardly surprising that small operators found it increasingly difficult to compete and that by the end of the eighteenth century the British trade was dominated by a small number of large planters and traders who could economise on costs such as insurance.

As has been indicated, the profitability of the slave trade was linked to, but not totally dependent on, that of the plantations. The British Caribbean colonies were principally sugar producers and debate as to the profitability of the sugar industry continues. It seems clear that many planters were suffering from diminishing returns during the period of abolition, but the alternative outlets for slave traders could protect them from the effects of such relative decline.4 In any case, continued slave imports were a necessity because of the ultimately self-defeating policy of transporting young African men rather than women and children, thus preventing the reproductive renewal of the slave population. In this respect the situation in the Caribbean contrasted with that in the American colonies where the slave population was growing without the help of imports.

War, revolution and rebellion

Whatever the overall long-term profitability or lack of it of the slave trade and the sugar plantations, it was probably ultimately the short-term disruptions they suffered which proved most decisive and which constitute the essential economic context for abolition. These disruptions were those caused by war and by the slave revolts. Four wars chart the changing balance of power in the Caribbean and on the American continent: the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1782), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and the (1803-1815). Despite British victories over the French in the Seven Years’ War, the Treaty of Paris (1763) restored Guadeloupe and Martinique to France in return for the French surrender of its North American territories in Canada to Britain and the transfer of Louisiana to Spain. Although French plantations were thus perpetuated, at the expense of Quebec, British maritime supremacy guaranteed an increasing domination of the slave traffic. The American War however severely disrupted slave traffic between the Caribbean and the American continent, and it was this period that saw the most rapid rise in French slave exports to Saint Domingue. During the French Revolutionary Wars the situation was reversed as the numbers of slaves transported by British ships reached their highest ever levels whereas the French slave trade collapsed, especially after the emancipation of slaves proclaimed by the revolutionary government in 1794. In the years immediately preceding abolition, British colonial slave imports fell significantly whereas those of the and Portugal continued to increase. As a result of the Saint Domingue slave revolts and Britain’s maritime blockade, the French slave traffic was minimal.5

4 Selwyn H.H. Carrington’s 2002 study of the sugar industry broadly supports the Williams thesis of declining profitability. 5 See the slave import figures given by David, RICHARDSON, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700-1810 : New Estimates of Volume and Distribution”, Journal of African History 30 (1989) in BLACK (ed.) The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. III, pp. 1-22. HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 15

In addition to these European and American wars, the 1790s saw a series of slave revolts which not only significantly affected the slave trade, but even more importantly radically undermined confidence in the entire slave economy. The vast numbers of slaves imported since the middle of the century had produced a situation in which slaves outnumbered the white colonial population by as much as eight to one, making large-scale slave revolts ever more likely. The rebellion in Saint Domingue led by Toussaint L’Ouverture drew in thousands of colonial troops, both French and British during the Revolutionary Wars and sparked other revolts in the British territories and on mainland America. The financial and human cost of repressing the slave revolts was a significant factor in raising doubts back in Britain as to the long-term viability of the slave trade.

Religion, morals and sentiment

The religious context is probably the most puzzling of all to the modern student of abolition. It is not the fact that the abolition movement should have been religiously inspired that is surprising, but that in the two centuries before the movement began, churches and religious groups throughout Europe and America should have been so silent on the issue. The reasons for this long-standing indifference to and complicity in the carrying on of the slave trade are complex, but at least part of the explanation must reside in the profoundly inward looking nature of religious belief and ecclesiastical polity. The seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism were fought out on a European stage and involved a struggle both for theological legitimacy and for political power. In England the establishment of a national church whose very basis was the pastoral care of a frequently refractory population, the Calvinist obsession with salvation which permeated both Dissent and the Church of England, the complex relationship between the Church and the Dissenters, and between dissenting sects – all incited faiths of whatever persuasion to see the business of religion in terms of a constant self-examination, be it individual or collective. In the eighteenth century, the threats to the hegemony of Anglicanism receded at the same time as its intervention in the political life of the country became more discreet. Whilst Anglicans in England and Presbyterians in Scotland were preoccupied with ecclesiastical management, Dissenters, who were losing ground in the mid-eighteenth century, were frequently embroiled in obscure theological disputes. There was little to induce organised religion to look beyond the boundaries of country, diocese or parish. When the horrors of slavery and the slave trade were commented on it was with a mixture of distaste and embarrassment; church leaders were as aware as anyone that the slave trade brought national prosperity. The Church of England was indeed actively involved in the sugar plantations through ownership by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts of the Codrington plantation in Barbados.6

The factors that changed this state of passive and active compliance are both to be found within organised religion and without it. Yet once again, it was the changing international situation in which the Caribbean became a frequent theatre of European

6 For an account of conditions on the Codrington plantation see , Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, London: Macmillan, 2005, pp.61-68. 16 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1 wars which was the most important stimulus to Christian reassessment of the slave trade. In particular, the changing relationship between Britain and the American colonies prior to the American War of Independence played a significant role in stimulating public debate on the slave trade. Two groups were particularly active in the initial phases of the abolitionist movement, one tightly knit and clearly identifiable, the other much more diffuse: the and the Evangelicals. The British Quakers, or the Society of Friends to give them their official title, had been active in a variety of causes since their foundation in the mid-seventeenth century by George Fox and his associates. Despite their early involvement in the American colonies, particularly in Pennsylvania which was founded and governed by William Penn, Quakers took some time to condemn the slave trade. A first condemnation by the London Yearly Meeting of the Society in 1720 was followed up by the increasing mobilisation of American Quakers such as Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benezet to stop the activities of American Quaker slave traders. The American campaign in turn stimulated discussion of the issue in England. Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, who both travelled to England, were particularly important in this respect. Similarly, John Wesley’s opposition to slavery resulted from the Methodist involvement in the founding of Georgia, a colony and then a state whose protracted hesitation between approval of the slave trade and abolition encapsulates the difficult choice between religious principle and the desire for colonial economic development, a development to which the slave trade was often seen as essential. Of the twelve members of the Abolition Committee set up in 1787, nine were Quakers, one of the most important being the American William Dillwyn who played a vital role in connecting American and British anti-slavery activity. Quakers were the true driving force behind the first abolition movement, providing the organisational basis on which the campaign was built. Thomas Clarkson, who whilst never becoming a member of the Society of Friends was so close to them that he came to see it as his true religious family, was able to use the network of Quaker links as he travelled about the country collecting evidence and mobilising support for the cause.

The second group, the Evangelicals, are more difficult to define as they did not constitute an organised group – indeed they hardly ever used the term ‘Evangelical’ to describe themselves – and they crossed the divide between Anglicanism and Dissent. The Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century is a complex movement whose origins are to be found both in the High Church writings of the non-juror William Law and the rekindling of the old Dissenting preoccupations of the mid- seventeenth century. The fundamental starting point for Evangelical belief and practice was individual conversion resulting from the interiorised consciousness of original sin. Conversion was the necessary step to the subsequent assessment of one’s chances of salvation, a question on which a whole variety of Calvinist positions were held from those who considered that the elect were constituted by a small number of people chosen by God even before the Fall, to the conviction that salvation was possible for all. It was this last position, defended by Wesley and which drew such vast crowds to much Methodist preaching across the country, that provided the link between the profoundly inward-looking spiritual concerns of Evangelicals and the wide world of unredeemed sin. For if conversion was possible it was the duty of those who had undergone such a profound spiritual experience to enable others to follow the same path. Spreading the Gospel – the true source of spiritual awakening– became the necessary vocation of the Evangelical.

HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 17

Whilst sinners were seen as being in plentiful supply in Britain, the populations of overseas territories were uncontaminated by Catholicism and (in the view of the Evangelicals) in a state of spiritual ignorance which would make them especially open to the Christian message. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of Evangelicals’ abhorrence of the slave trade, but what made the issue so important to them was the Christian duty they felt not just to save the slaves from the miseries of the but from spiritual damnation. Quakers were only marginally interested in converting slaves to Christianity but Evangelicals saw them as a vast reserve of souls waiting to be saved. Salvation did not necessarily require emancipation and it was as much the impious behaviour of the slave captains in trading in human flesh as the plight of the slaves which prompted their anger. Precisely because of their compulsion to convert however, Evangelicals took a keen interest in Africa itself, particularly after the setting up of the haven for returning slaves. Whereas Clarkson, who carried with him on his campaigning journeys a variety of African produced artefacts, stressed the economic potential of the continent, Evangelicals viewed it as a vast missionary territory.

Early Evangelical abolitionist activity includes John Wesley’s 1774 tract, Thoughts upon Slavery and ’s pioneering legal campaigns. Sharp, along with another Anglican, Philip Sansom, provided an essential link between the Abolition Committee and the so-called Clapham Sect which gathered around . Wilberforce underwent his own spiritual crisis and conversion in 1785, but it was his membership of the House of Commons which enabled him to gain the ear of the rich and the famous. It is significant that Wilberforce counted among his close friends several prominent representatives of the East Indian interest such as Charles Grant and Lord Teignmouth. They welcomed the prospect of developing an even more lucrative eastern colonial trade without the stain of slavery, one which would provide more profits and more potential converts. Such arguments were instrumental in minimising the dangers of abolition in the eyes of many Anglicans and indeed of the Church of England itself.

The ultimate success of the campaign initiated by the Abolition Committee and its allies also demonstrates the receptivity of ‘public opinion’ – itself a new concept – to arguments based on the condemnation of cruelty and mistreatment and the right of each individual to a minimum degree of physical and moral integrity. Such ideas had emerged in part from philosophical thinking, particularly in Scotland, but also from the sentimentalism that characterises so much of mid and late eighteenth-century literature.7 Compassion for the suffering of others was a major ingredient in the success of such novels as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. That slaves did not generally qualify as recipients of such fictional compassion does not mean that the empathy sentimentalism promoted could not be transferred to them. The gradual accumulation of plays, poems, and sermons, as well as works of political science and history, which condemned the cruelty of slavery is both a sign and a contributory cause of the public response to . Behind this response lies the growing literacy rates, particularly amongst women who came to play a crucial role in the abolition movement.

7 Scottish XVIIIth century writers who denounced the slave trade include Frances Hutcheson, George Wallace, and Adam Ferguson and William Robertson. 18 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1

Popular politics

One of the most important British contexts of the abolition movement was the radical popular politics that had blossomed since John Wilkes first appeared on the political scene in the early 1760s. What was at first a campaign by Wilkes and his supporters in London against his arrest on a charge of seditious libel after the publication of number 45 of his paper The North Briton in 1763 turned into a long- running political struggle after Wilkes was three times elected as member of Parliament for Middlesex, only to be expelled each time by the House of Commons. After a fourth election the Commons declared his court sponsored opponent victorious despite Wilkes having polled nearly four times as many votes as him. Wilkes came to embody the idea of English liberty oppressed by a tyrannical government. The legitimacy he claimed was that of numbers, not of interest, of extra-parliamentary politics, not of court favour or political patronage. Wilkes was supported by an increasingly widespread and well-organized network of clubs and associations which were able to mobilize popular support at meetings and demonstrations and through the petitions they sent to Parliament. Petitions were nothing new – West India merchants had used them to object to the government’s imposition of tariffs on colonial imports in the mid-1760s– but they increasingly constituted a means of bringing popular opinion to bear on a Parliament from whose election and membership their signatories were entirely excluded.

Radical politics subsequently moved away from the issues surrounding John Wilkes himself to espouse the cause of political reform. In doing so it initiated a new form of political activity based on societies and associations such as the Westminster Association, the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, the various Constitutional Societies and the provincial Associations orchestrated by Christopher Wyvill in the 1770s. Wyvill’s ability to coordinate the efforts of geographically disparate and autonomous groups into a movement with real political weight pointed the way to the similar organisation of the Abolition committees. Thomas Clarkson was astonished at the speed at which a city like Manchester could gather signatures for petitions, but its population was drawing on the experience of more than a decade of radical political campaigning. Similarly, the vitally important role of a publisher such as the Quaker James Phillips, from whose printing press many of the early abolitionist tracts issued, mirrored the importance of the wide diffusion of printed material, from newspapers to pamphlets, tracts and handbills, during the radical agitation of the 1770s and early 1780s. Radicals did not necessarily become active abolitionists and few of the early abolitionists had been involved in radical politics, but the techniques and tactics used to organise a popular movement which could bring significant pressure to bear on Parliament and government were those that the radicals had already used to such effect.

To British domestic radicalism was added the ferment surrounding the protests of the American colonists which paved the way for the American Revolution and the War of Independence. Radicals espoused the colonists’ cause for the same reason that they had opposed government high-handedness at home. Criticism of excessive monarchical power and its exploitation by a small coterie of politicians swelled into the full-blown attack on monarchy in Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Yet the colonists’ cause was not necessarily that of the slaves nor of the abolitionists; it was the British who offered freedom to slaves as a ploy to weaken the colonial economy HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 19 and to raise extra troops. Mention of abolition was absent from the Declaration of Independence and it was only after the end of the war that the first moves to emancipation were made in Pennsylvania. In similar fashion, the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars made France even more conscious of the economic value of its sugar colonies and it was only the upheavals in Saint Domingue which brought about the declaration of emancipation in 1794. Paradoxically, strong British central government control over the Caribbean colonial administration came to be a necessary element of the abolitionist strategy, for the islands’ own legislatures could never be relied on to enforce restrictions on the slave trade, let alone its abolition.

Parliamentary politics

The crucial initial decision of the Abolition Committee was to target the slave trade and not slavery itself. Clarkson’s own account of this decision is worth recalling. The Committee first agreed that the ultimate aim was to render the slave trade unnecessary by creating conditions in which the slave population would naturally increase. In considering that the material improvements which such an increase implied would gradually lead to emancipation, the Committee was clearly influenced by events in the former American colonies and notably the decision to move to gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania where Quakers were particularly influential. The reasons why the slave trade was to be targeted were principally those of political expediency:

By doing this, and this only, they would not incur the objection, that they were meddling with the property of the planters, and letting loose an irritated race of beings, who, in consequence of all the vices and infirmities which a state of slavery entails upon those who undergo it, were unfit for their freedom. By asking the government of the country to do this, and this only, they were asking for that which it had an indisputable right to do; namely, to regulate or abolish any of its branches of commerce: whereas it was doubtful, whether it could interfere with the management of the internal affairs of the colonies, or whether this was not wholly the province of the legislatures established there. By asking the government, again, to do this, and this only, they were asking what it could really enforce. It could station its ships of war, and command its custom-houses, so as to carry any act of this kind into effect. But it could not insure that an act to be observed in the heart of the islands should be enforced.8

In short, the abolitionists saw the slave trade as part of a mercantilist system governed by the Navigation Acts, a legislative code and a commercial system which could be modified by the British Parliament.

Abolitionists then, like the campaigners for electoral reform, looked to the legislative power to enact the change they campaigned for. As with political radicalism the ambiguity of this position is evident: in the same way that Parliament was being

8 Thomas CLARKSON, The History of the Rise, Progress, and the Accomplshment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament [1808], Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006, p. 120. 20 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1 asked to reform the way it was itself elected, so abolitionists were appealing to a body of men whose vested interest – direct or indirect– in the slave trade was only too obvious. In the dark years of the 1790s when the abolitionist cause was all too easily tarred with the brush of Jacobinism, the Committee’s decision seemed to have been a major tactical error. Yet the constitutionality of their position did enable the cause to revive once the immediate threat of revolutionary contamination from France had faded. It was paradoxically in the climate of the rigorous repression of radical activity instituted by the Pitt government that the abolitionist cause ultimately triumphed.

Precisely because of their initial tactical choice, Parliament and parliamentary politics became a further and essential context to the abolitionists’ campaign. An abolitionist presence in the House of Commons was indispensable and this was where William Wilberforce was so important, whatever his deficiencies as a parliamentary manager. Wilberforce had the great advantage of having rock-solid Tory credentials, and so was able to shield abolitionism from charges of political radicalism. His friendship with Pitt helped the young Prime Minister to declare his open support to the cause, especially during his initial reformist period in office. Even more important, Wilberforce was able to attract the sympathy of Tory back-benchers who were suspicious of the important West Indian lobby which was well represented in the Commons. As the Whigs gradually disintegrated, with many Old Whigs transferring their allegiance to Pitt and the radical Whigs under the leadership of Charles James Fox reduced to a rump of little more than 50 MPs as the French Revolution entered the Terror, such Tory support was indispensable to keep the cause of abolition alive.

Abolition was never a party issue, which explains in part why even the support of Pitt, Fox and Burke was insufficient to ensure Commons approval for the bills which Wilberforce presented year after year. Pitt was a political leader but not a political patron. It was Henry Dundas, whose parliamentary influence included the control of almost the entire Scottish representation, who prevented abolition being carried in the 1792 debate when Pitt spoke so eloquently in its support. Thereafter, despite sometimes narrow defeats, the international context was less and less favourable to success as the French Revolution and the slave revolt in Saint Domingue sent shudders through the entire political and landed elite. Even at the height of the controversy, the abolition debates were not always well attended, attracting nothing like the numbers of MPs that flocked to vote on the issue of Catholic relief. However by the end of the century, the tide was beginning to turn. The passage of the 1799 bill limiting the number of slaves per ship to 289 was a first victory. The influx of Irish MPs after the Act of Union helped the abolitionists and in 1804 Wilberforce’s bill passed the Commons only to be defeated in the Lords. The impeachment of Dundas for mismanagement of funds whilst at an earlier post as Navy Treasurer was a further turning point. Such internal changes were as important as the mood of public opinion because so few elections, particularly in the county seats, were ever contested. Only in the borough seats, including of course the slave ports of London, Bristol and Liverpool, was there any real opportunity to bring opinion to bear on the composition of Parliament.

For all the strenuous campaigning and petitioning of the abolitionists, the final hurdle was only crossed because of the tactical genius of the most neglected of the anti-slave trade campaigners, James Stephen, one of the very few, along with James HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 21

Ramsay, who had first-hand experience of the slave colonies. By introducing the Foreign Slave Trade bill, which banned British slave trading to foreign countries and in particular to France, Stephen took the West Indian lobby by surprise and played an impeccably patriotic hand. The bill in effect severely limited the slave trade because large numbers of neutral slave ships which flew the American flag were in fact crewed and fitted in Britain. The French slave trade was in any case much reduced following the independence of Haiti. Suddenly it became clear that Britain stood to lose relatively little by abolishing the trade and so the 1807 bill went through. The mysterious alchemy of an unrepresentative, often corrupt and notoriously conservative Parliament provides the final context for abolition. The absence of lists of the Members of Parliament who voted on all the abolition bills except one (in 1794) make a detailed analysis of the individual motivations of all but the most prominent politicians extremely difficult.9 As with the current debate on the reasons for abolition, distinguishing self-interest and humanitarian concern is almost impossible. Yet the effect of abolition was clear; it seemed at least to demonstrate that the years of campaigning had paid off and that similar campaigns could succeed in the future.

This all too brief survey of some of the principal contexts in which the abolition of the slave trade can be studied indicates the need to examine the relationships between them. It is in the complex interaction between economic and commercial interests, religious beliefs, political practice and cultural change that a fuller understanding of what brought an end to a three hundred year old trade resides. These links are not straightforward; they cannot be reduced to the individual motivation of the abolitionists just as they do not lie exclusively in the workings of the market in slaves or the profits of the sugar industry. Above all they cannot be conveniently arranged in a hierarchy of fundamental and secondary factors. Sometimes, seeking to understand how something happens is more productive, more enlightening than trying to explain why. Thomas Clarkson’s account of the abolition campaign, an account which, for all its shortcomings and blind spots, remains an immensely compelling document, frequently offers us this multifaceted picture of a pivotal moment in British history, yet few would subscribe to his opinion that abolition demonstrates that ‘a little virtue, when properly leavened, is made capable of counteracting the effects of a mass of vice!’10 If only history were so simple!

Bibliography

Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791, London: James Phillips, 1791, 128 p. BENDER, Thomas (ed.). The Antislavery Debate. Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 325 p. Incl. extracts from works by David Brion Davis, Thomas L. Heskell and John Ashworth. BLACK, Jeremy (ed.). The Atlantic Slave Trade, vol. III Eighteenth Century, vol. IV Nineteenth Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006.

9 For analysis of the 1794 vote see R.G. THORNE, The History of Parliament. The House of Commons, 1790-1820, vol. I Introductory Survey. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986, p. 141. 10 Thomas CLARKSON, The History of the Rise, Progress, and the Accomplshment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament [1808], op. cit. p.415. 22 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1

BURNARD, T.G. “’Prodigious riches’: the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution”, Economic History Review 54 (2001), 506-524. In BLACK, Jeremy (ed.). The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. III, pp. 265-283. BURTON, Ann M. “British Evangelicals, Economic Warfare and the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1794-1810”, Anglican and Episcopal History 65 (1996), 197-225. In BLACK, Jeremy (ed.). The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. IV, pp. 117-145. CAREY, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760-1807. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 248p. CARRINGTON, Selwyn H.H. The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2002, 362 p. CLARKSON, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress, and the Accompllshment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament [1808]. Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006, 416 p. DAVIS, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 576 p. DRESCHER, Seymour. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. London: Macmillan, 1984, 300 p. —. “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade”, Past and Present 143 (1994); pp. 136-166. In Black ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. IV, pp. 71-101. EQUIANO, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and other Writings. CARRETTA Vincent (ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003, 393 p. HINDMARSH, D. Bruce. and the English Evangelical Tradition. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996, 366 p. HOCHSCHILD, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. London: Macmillan, 2005, 467 p. INIKORI, J.E. “Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century”, Journal of Economic History 41 (1981), pp. 745-776. In BLACK, Jeremy (ed.). The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. III, pp. 125-156. OLDFIELD, John. “Britain and the Slave Trade” pp. 489-498 in H.T. DICKINSON (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 550 p. RICHARDSON, David. “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700- 1810 : New Estimates of Volume and Distribution”, Journal of African History 30 (1989), pp. 1-22. In BLACK, Jeremy (ed.). The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. III, pp. 1-22. —. “Prices of Slaves in West and West-Central Africa: Toward an Annual Series 1698-1807”, Bulletin of Economic Research 43 (1991), pp. 21-56. In Black ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade vol. III, pp. 22-53. THORNE, R.G. The History of Parliament. The House of Commons, 1790-1820, vol. I Introductory Survey. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986, 405 p. THOMAS, Hugh. The Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. London: Macmillan Picador, 1997, 925 p. WALVIN, James. England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776-1838. London: Macmillan, 1986, 202 p. —. Black Ivory: Slavery in the . 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 324 p.